Re:The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft
by jacquesm on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @05:32PM
(#29087662)
The depiction was as relevant to the WWW as the browser is: the presentation is up to the client, remember that Lynx and Firefox are both perfectly good web clients (in principle, we've killed that aspect of the web for the most part by insisting on pixel perfect copies instead of broad rendering hints). But depending on bandwidth and rendering capability of your device you could have the entirety of the gamma ranging from text-only all the way to full immersive 3D and everything in between.
Re:The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft
by jimmySixDOF on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @11:10PM
(#29090713)
You have the right take here - the Metaverse is basically the internet with a Z axis in the DOM - and anyone is free to do with that as they may.
Its been around for longer than Second Life in pancake kvm forms but the latest iteration is based on Immersion or Embodied experience facilitated by the new hardware price/performance advances.
VR hardware is just about over the chasm and proper wide fov AR is on the horizon although semi AR/MR is possible today (e.g. Pokemon Go as a shared overlay of digital world space on to a shared real world space).
The Immersive Embodied Metaverse is available over the internet using open W3C WebXR standards today and this will get better as the space and infrastructure matures.
Re:The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft
by alehlopeh on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @11:35PM
(#29090844)
“The internet with a Z axis in the DOM” doesn’t really make sense when you consider that the DOM already has a Z axis, and it’s a web thing not an internet thing.
Re:The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft
by vidarh on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @02:22AM
(#29091612)
Incidentally, those of us old enough may remember the number of websites having "streets" and "neighbourhoods" in the 90s while people were still trying to figure out how to translate things from offline to online.
Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.
Yes, this is absolutely correct.
A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the shop. We have a shared space with the qualities of presence (I passively saw you while you were browsing) and persistence (the graffiti will be there for anyone to see).
In the metaverse, I open some application on a computer, I look at some window or readout, I see that you're online (maybe I just see a light next to a username, or maybe I see your WoW character dancing shirtless outside of Goldshire), I leave something persistent (maybe a comment on a blog post, maybe a spray on the wall in an MMOFPS), which is available for you to see at some point. There are hundreds of metaverses (that's nearly the whole point; a metaverse is a virtual space that isn't bound by the rules and limits of physical space, so why not inhabit a few dozen?) of varying complexity (many websites, IRC, BBSes) and immersiveness (Minecraft, Second Life, PlayStation Home). VR isn't intrinsic to the idea of a metaverse, it's just one potential realization of the idea.
> Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember?
Stephenson depicted his metaverse as a virtual space for the sake of the reader's imagination, so that they could envision something real and familiar instead of just a bunch of people clacking away on keyboards. The "virtual street" metaphor used in Snow Crash was always just a convenient literary device, and not at all the point of the metaverse, which to reiterate is the idea of a virtual shared universe in which to exist that is unbound from the restrictions of the physical universe.